Does Traditional Marketing Still Outperform Digital Marketing?

Getting the perfect marketing strategy for your business is paramount if you want to make a big impact on your audience. Is traditional marketing a dying trend? Do people still read newspaper articles? Do they use the services of the business after hearing a radio ad? Here are the benefits of traditional marketing and how digital marketing is on the rise…

The Benefits of Traditional Marketing

You can easily reach your local target audience. For example, you could send out a radio ad and people in your area will hear it. You could send out flyers or a newspaper article to homes advertising your business and it would reach everyone in that area.

The physical materials can be kept. Your audience would have a physical hard copy of the material you’ve sent out, which they can read or browse through for the foreseeable future. They can also reference back on it and it’s there if you ever need it.

It’s easy to understand, purely because the majority of people are familiar with this kind of marketing. People are regularly exposed to newspaper and radio, so it would be easy for them to understand and not have to learn anything new.

The Limitations of Traditional Marketing

There is very little interaction with traditional marketing regarding a physical copy of something and your brand. For example, what you are marketing in a newspaper is providing information to the public about an existing brand, in the hope that your audience are already familiar with the brand.

You can’t easily see whether a print based advert or radio advert campaign was successful. Also, you can’t easily track numbers and results, so it’s harder to see if it had an affect or not.

The Benefits of Digital Marketing

You can target a local audience with digital marketing, but it has the ability to be an international one, too. You also have the ability to tailor the campaign to your specific needs. You can focus on specific audience demographics, such as gender, age, location and interests. Doing this means you’re more likely to have a successful campaign and in turn, it’ll be more cost effective to do it that way.

Your target audience have the ability to choose what platform they can receive your content on. There’s such a variety of platforms now, from social media to blog posts, to emails or videos, everyone has their preferred way about learning something. This is something that traditional marketing doesn’t have a control over. Nowadays, a lot of people see posters and flyers on their doorstep as junk and won’t keep them unless it’s a solution to a problem they have right there and then.

You can interact with your audience as little or as much as you like, but with social media networks, you feel encouraged to create interaction. You can entice readers to your site, read about your product and services, buy them, rate them, leave feedback and create some loyal customers. Something which would be hard to do with traditional marketing methods.

Digital marketing is cost-efficient. Some companies invest on paid ads online, but the cost will still be cheaper compared to traditional marketing and will inevitably reach more people.

Data and results are easily recorded. You can easily check up on campaigns at any time, using tools like Google Analytics. You have the opportunity to check your results and adapt quickly if something wasn’t doing so well. Something that you definitely couldn’t do with traditional marketing!

You have the ability to check your results at any time, you don’t have to wait to find out. You can check out the number of visitors coming to your site, if there are an increased number of subscribers, what people are looking at the most.

A well-maintained website with good quality content is key for making a good first impression of your site and to make your brand professional. Keeping on top of social media is key too as you can interact with your audience.

Your message can spread far on digital marketing with just a click of a button. You can use social media share buttons on your website, email and social media channels which can share your message instantly. Another big positive about digital marketing is that there are many companies that offer this service, such as SEO Essex Co, who will create and manage your entire digital marketing strategy.

How Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing Are Now Integrated

Both marketing methods work well, but of course digital marketing has the upper hand with regards to be able to reach out to more people and have more of an impact.

Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing are now very much integrated. Smart TVs and mobile phones now display similar content to magazines and television, and you have the ability to watch and listen to things on the go. Traditional marketing will never die out, because companies will always locally advertise in papers and on flyers, but digital marketing makes it much easier in our busier lives. Traditional and digital marketing are merging into a single approach, ready to make a big impact on business and campaigns all around the world.